Lol, that's what I thought this was about too.
Why don't these people/companies think about how hard it will be to search for their $thing !?
Yeah like /e/ os. That's hard to search for because the slash is ignored and the e is only one letter.
All the results for "e os" are about /e/OS, and that's its full name, so you wouldn't just search for "e". D language is a better example — its just called "D", but searching for that doesn't give results about the language. On the other hand, for "C" and "R" the top results are all about the languages. "Go" is also a pretty bad one, they insist it's not called "golang" but you basically have to search for that to get any useful information.
Google search has generally rotted. Can't get promoted for maintenance.
That’s best case scenario. Worst case is that they’re censoring the internet on a massive scale but have rolled it out slowly enough that no one noticed
They are. There’s been a bunch of studies already showing how Google skews its results to align with oligarch interests.
I'm now getting _this HN article_ as the top Google result for "list of public atproto relays". Weird.
Yes, I "used an incognito window". Yes, I checked on multiple devices. Yes, Google is personalized. Maybe if you search "list of public atproto relays" from East Timor you get lists of public atproto relays. But you sure don't from Seattle right now.
That result set is pretty damning: Google finds the architecture explainer but misses four pages that actually answer the query. Whatever the cause, atproto clearly has a discoverability problem.
I got 2300 results. DuckDuckGo Uses google. Google is very personalised. They use many dirty tricks to give personalised results. Use another box and check the results again.
Are any of those results a list of public atproto relays?
Could you link it? Curious to see how buried it is for me. Personalization is one thing but on my results I'm getting Tor relays, Nostr relays, IPFS relays, and Fediverse relays and I haven't yet seen a list of atproto relays. I'm on like page 6 now.
Kagi's are good, yes. The issue is with Google's.
Can confirm that I can also reproduce this. Interesting.
In the AI overview yeah, but do you see the sites below? I wonder if it's being tuned to prefer generating its own "list of X" implementations and downranking other peoples' lists.
Use incognito/private browsing mode to get a genuine sense of whether something isn’t in the index or whether google decides that even though you’re asking for it you probably don’t want it.
I can reproduce the same in incognito mode.
Spare us the conspiracy;
atproto.at? firehose.directory? Why would google index any of those sites with no authority/age? Maybe the owners didn't submit them to give them some credibility to start. Maybe the results vary.
Google has indexed both of them, actually, you can search successfully for those two domains directly. They just don't come up when you search for "list of public atproto relays". Any other theories?
"Credibility" for Google seems to mean being around for 5 years or having over 10 million dollars. They no longer try to surface the long tail of websites.